HR Geeks

Adam has upgraded WP and there is a new and nicer admin interface.

Also at my request he has added the WP plug-in Linkle:

“This plugin allows you to easily insert a wide variety of links into your wordpress documents with the following tag style:

[ ln wikipedia]topic[/ln]
[ ln php]htmlentities[/ln]
[ ln amazon]978-0321396853[text]Eclipse Web Tools Platform[/text][/ln]

NOTE: I had to add the “[<space>” in order for the code to show, remove the space before using.

Or you can add links by clicking the ‘ln’ button inside of the wysiwyg editor. This will bring up a dialog box where you enter in the necessary data for that particular link

The following types of links are currently supported by default (with more on the way):

• amazon
• gravatar
• php
• twitter-rss
• wikipedia
• wppost”

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So for those of you who may have had strange Cox outage issues in the HR area this fine Wednesday (04/02/08) morning, I have some good news. I think I know what was going on. At about 9:30 it would appear my network at work was on the painful end of a DoS attack from somewhere on the internet. At the peak we were getting about 40,000 packets/sec through one provider and 70,000 through the other, bringing our router to it’s knees (normal load for us is about 3000/sec). It would appear that this attack caused some pretty major problems for Cox as well. It just stopped all on it’s own at about 11:00 and neither provider has any reliable information about where it came from. It was still Apr 1 in China at 9:00 AM right?

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I recently was linked to Flash Earth. This site allows you to switch between satellite map views with a click of the mouse. Compare Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft VE (Virtual Earth), Ask.com, OpenLayers, and NASA Terra.

Images are presented via an all Flash interface and the speed you can switch between services and at which the overlays are changed is quite amazing.

I thought Google had really good images of Norfolk till I switched over to Microsoft VE. Here is an example of the Norfolk Southern coal yard and train depot. (Left: Microsoft VE,Right: Google)

Thanks Erin.

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While it’s not a new tool, it’s new to me!This weekend I was cleaning up my office and decided it was time to throw out a bunch of old hard disks and two old PCs I have been hanging on to for no good reason. I’m a lazy, lazy man, and I knew there had to be a semi-automated way to wipe all these disks without a writing a foreach loop

Say hello to my new friend Darik’s Boot and Nuke.

I installed all the disks in the two PCs and booted them both off a USB key with DBAN. It detected all the disks in the machines and prompted me with my wipe options. The nice part about this utility is that it wipes all disks simultaneously. If you’re in a hurry you can type ‘autonuke’ at the boot menu and it will start wiping all disks automatically. Good if the feds are knocking on your door…

It took just under 36hrs for DBAN to finish wiping all the disks with a 5x wipe. It will never replace my thermite, but it’s incredibly handy.

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NORFOLK: In what appears to be breaking new, er news, Ethan mounts his Segway again after being tossed and battered (deep fried salad?) only months ago. Is the leg ready to travel? Does his insurance know about this? Looks like its charged and ready to go and Ethan is poised to take on Norfolk Police again Segway style.

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Something curious I noticed today. Login to Newegg using Firefox and you are forced to use a CAPTCHA, use IE and its not there. I’m going with IE here because I couldnt figure out if it was showing me a “Z” or and “N” and neither would work!

Now while I am generally a fan of CAPTCHA, I am an even bigger fan of using the computer for good; enter reCAPTCHA. Essentially, a Carnegie Mellon team led by Luis von Ahn noticed that during the process of digitizing books there are words during scanning process which cannot be converted by OCR software to text. “Each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA.”

Here’s how it works:

“Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.”

By reCAPTCHA’s estimates about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans every day, equating to more than 150,000 hours of work each day worldwide. Thats a lot of potentially useful computing power for the general good by taking the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

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For a while I’ve been talking about using a really neat standalone injection system on one of my cars. The system I’ve been looking at for a good while is called MegaSquirt developed by Bowling and Grippo. The hardware is built around a Motorola MC9S12C64 microcontroller on a custom PCB. If you are inclined, you can even just buy the PCB and buy all the parts from mouser to build it yourself or for the rest of us there are a few places online that will sell you a completed kit ready to go. Some of the early code was written in assembly, but the more modern programs are all written in c.

For those not familiar, in a gasoline engine the ratio of air to fuel that gets burned in the engine is critical for both engine health and performance. Too little fuel and you can risk damaging the engine, too much fuel and you lose power and waste fuel. The fuel injection system is responsible for determining the amount of air entering the system and providing the appropriate amount of fuel for proper combustion. In many cases the same system is also responsible for correctly timing the spark that ignites the air and fuel mixture.

MegaSquirt is ideal for people looking to shed their old carburetors or mechanical fuel injections systems and update to modern electronic fuel injection (assuming they have the expertise and free time). It’s also an excellent choice for DIY tuners if you want to spend the time (and dyno runs) to squeeze every last horsey out of a motor.  Similar commercially built systems are available but most of them cost several thousands of dollars, whereas a fully assembled MegaSquirt unit can be had for around $300.

I’m going to be undertaking this project on my 1983 Volvo 240 Turbo (If Telmnstr will let me maybe I’ll try to get it on 757labs) but I’m looking to maybe get some of the car and computer nerds together on this one as there are a lot of things that have to be right before the car will even start. Things like calibrating all of the sensors, building a wiring harness, some machine work for various trigger wheels, programming maps and tables into the computer etc.  If anyone wants to get involved shoot me an e-mail.

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A few weeks ago I completed a pretty simple hack to directly control Pioneer after market stereos with the steering wheel controls of my Honda Accord (98 to 02 should apply). I wrote it up and posted it over at www.757labs.com. It should work with Sony decks as well (different resistor values). Do not know about Alpine, Clarion or other makes.

http://www.757labs.com/projects/Honda-Pioneer-SteeringWheelAudio.pdf

I’ve got another release coming soon as well.Enjoy!

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This morning oreo and I were looking into a SSH issue with one of our cpanel servers (yes, yes I know) when we discovered a hacked web hosting account running a ventrillo server. When we went to kill the users’ other processes we noticed something else running that was a little more interesting…

/home/<removed>/public_html/drivers/CVC/src/ircd

Our hosting box was also running an IRC daemon optimized for controlling botnets. Neato!

After fiddling for a bit we now had the IRC connection password and the IRC OP login. When we logged in we were quite surprised to find 800 exploited computers happily connected and awaiting orders. We tried a few commands but couldn’t figure out exactly how to control the botnet.

That was until we discovered the brilliant botnet operator had turned on debug logging. All that work setting up a server designed to hide who was connected and what was going on, only to turn on debugging. Whoops!

Not only did we now have full logs of how to control the bots, we were able to lock the operator out of his network by changing all his passwords.

As you might expect, the botnet owner was pretty upset. We contacted him via IRC and received a friendly response…

if you not give me back my bots i’ll destorys you
remmber that
i got your computer and your box
and alot more
i known you

I’m sure the stress of losing all the nodes he worked so hard to exploit had him a little upset

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